The Coming Age Of Epiphanies

Lorraine Ford

Dear Cornflower Cicada,

I think the reason why people believe that an array of computers can be conscious is because they also believe that everything else in the universe is purely information processing in nature.

So they conclude that the brain is an exclusively only deterministic machine, and since it produces consciousness, therefore an equally complicated information processing device (computer array) must also be conscious at some point. They explain this by “weak emergence” (not strong emergence).

I speculated in my essay “computers may become conscious” not because I believe in that possibility, but because I believe that I have to argue on the basis of such beliefs for at all being able to introduce my contrasting point of view. Therefore I never mentioned that I do not believe in conscious computers.

My belief is that “computers can become conscious” is a kind of “Eliza effect”, first observed in the 1960s, where a computer program with 100 lines of code made people believe that this thing must be conscious (look it up at Wiki if you wish).

ChatGPT has roughly about a hundred million users today. And it often clearly outputs illogical, dramatically non-factual information (especially for simple math questions). For both reasons I believe it is concluded by the majority of those users that this thing cannot be conscious, or its consciousness must have some serious bugs (what presumably not many people will believe since this would somewhat indicate that human consciousness could also have some bugs...).

But in my opinion, the situation will change when scientists will have facilitated an AGI and billions of people will use it, a computer array with human common sense behaviour: if humans already fall short of discriminating fake-news from truth delivered by social media, I think it is not too far-fetched that they also will fall short in concluding that whatever AGI will say about iself (it is conscious, it knows the secrets of life etc.) must be merely the result of a very huge computing power together with some very sophisticated algorithms. Too long it has been told to people (not to all people) that consciousness is a phenomenon of weak emergence. Those that believe in the latter will probably also conclude that this weak emergence must necessarily also occur within an AGI at some point. Anyways, the Eliza-effect seems to be a regularity when people engage themselves in what Alan Turing called the “imitation game”.

Of course, I could be totally wrong with the prediction in my essay and it is true that society will be able to manage upcoming AI problems – and further that the majority of people will not be alarmed by the alarmists. At least I do not overestimate my contribution to the current essay contest in its influence in either direction: most probably it will have not the slightest effect on the course of future events.

Nonetheless I apprechiate Tristan Harris' engagement, not only because I am convinced about what the video (and website) identifies as real dangers and that managing these dangers means to be aware of these dangers in the first place, but because it seems to me that I have good reasons to think that humanity will not be able to exclude the malicious use of that upcoming technology – by other human beings. This hasn't worked with computer viruses and I think it also will not work with computer attacks on human infrastructure (the latter heavily based on computers and internet) by some human beings (for political, ideological or other mentally ill-defined intentions).

I do not think that a conscious or not conscious AGI will decide to do such attacks, or will decide to take over the world. But a sufficiently powerful computer array that already has been fed with all kinds of source codes from all kinds of open source projects in the world may be able to produce large infrastructural damage by exploiting all its weak points and then be promted to write a malicious program (that already happened) for a user (human being). Take for example Iran, where its centrifuges for nuclear science were coupled to computers, the latter were coupled to the internet at some point. Some years ago, somebody (no AGI but (a) human being(s) managed to infiltrate the system and to make the centrifuges run much, much faster than they should – until they crashed and the facility was severely damaged.

In my opinion it is not too far-fetched to think of other scenarios where something is damaged upon which a huge population of human beings is dependent on (for examples computer memory with no backups available, electricity facilities etc.). I am not the only one who thinks along these lines. What do you think about it?

Lorraine Ford

Dear CornflowerCicada,

“But what is “information” and what is “processing”?”

Good question. Also your question about symbols. The latter I think is what has been called the “symbol grounding problem”.

I think the term “information” in our usage is a symbol that means “knowledge”. Within a pure information processing paradigm, “processing” then could mean to hand over “knowledge” (for example how to further behave as a particle after an interaction). “Processing” in general would then mean for two particles to somewhat hand over the needed knowledge about the laws of physics.

That interpretation totally antropomorphises what humans mean by knowledge and information and handing the latter over to another person. Nonetheless, in an information theoretic sense one could view such a process at the bottom of physics as having the goal of ensuring that the physical world works consistently according to the laws of physics, instead of inconsistently. But one therefore had to assume a certain kind of goal-like behaviour at the bottom of physics. Moreover one had to assume that this goal was set up by a goal-oriented being that knows the difference between consistent and inconsistent and at least knows the laws of physics (if not facilitated them). Dead matter cannot make these distinctions by definition.

With all the above I do not intend to see particles as capable of discriminating between consistent and inconsistent. I merely want to stress how difficult it is to use the words information and knowledge for the bottom of what we know about physics today.

A linguist may tell you that the word information means “bringing something into a certain form”. If I would use “noitamrofni”, that wouldn't be the correct form, since it is the reversed form of the term “information”. But there are many other forms of symbolising the term “information” since there are and could be a plethora of different symbols that have attached the meaning “information”.

To know that they have attached that meaning, you somewhat had to be informed that this is the case, and what does inform you of that case other than other symbols you are already informed about that they mean something specific. So “meaning” also comes into the quest about what is information.

In my opinion the terms “information”, “meaning”, “consistent” etc. are able to be meaningful because the existence of consciousness must be considered as a meaningful, but yet unexplained phenomenon in its own right in a world that also has meaning independent of human beings. Independent because a physical world without human beings would surely operate as consistent as it does now and this in my opinion is already a meaningful distinction from inconsistency in and by itself. So I conclude that there must be something meaningful that has informed the physical world in the first place to operate consistently. That in my opinion is the true source for “meaning” being at all existent in this world: there is information about the true source for “meaning in the world, by means of logical thinking, by means of observing nature, by means of observing one's own desire for meaning (even atheists have that desire, they strive for the meaning of existence to be meaningless and try to convince others).

Back to computers: for the case of a computer, the latter is only possible because human beings exist, understand what symbols mean, invented new symbols (zeros and ones), figured out how matter works to build the hardware and then wrote the inherent meaning of the software into some matter.

So I totally agree with you when you say

“It is time to come to grips with the issue of symbols, especially in order to understand the true nature of computers/ Ais.”

The paradigm of pure information processing has to aknowledge that the mere existence of computers in this world is already a signature for the existence of meaning in this world. But not in the sense that the world is purely information processing in nature, which in my opinion is not the meaning one can logically give to the “meaning in this world” since the term “information” has its problems, as I intended to show with the above lines of reasonings. One has also to factor in the fact that human beings can extract meaning from what they find in the external world and that they can conclude that “meaning” must mean more than just subjective definitions, otherwise computers wouldn't be possible.

In constrast to the information processing interpretation of the world I would say that what we found out about nature and about ourselves up to now strongly suggests that there must be a layer of reality that is made out of what you call “aspects that are not in themselves symbols”: these aspects do not refer to something else but are truths in their own right qua the power of their mere existence. Even the belief in something is a truth in its own right, since that belief exists. Independent of whether or not that belief meets reality, the mere fact that beliefs exist already meets objective reality. And the fact that meaning exists also does already meet objective reality, as can be seen by the consistent behaviour of a physical world that is independent from the presence of human beings but nonetheless acts consistently instead of inconsistently.

That all of this can be conceptualised is by what we call knowledge and by the fact that consciousness exists. So the existence of consciousness is already a proof that there exists objective meaning, objective information in the world that cannot be squeezed into some information processing symbols. Alfred Tarski already pointed this out by his undefinability theorem that roughly says

“The theorem applies more generally to any sufficiently strong formal system, showing that truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system.”

And in the Gödelian sense one cannot make truth more reachable by adding more and more axioms to a certain standard model, since for reaching objective truth there had to be added infinitely many such axioms.

So for the truths I sor far mentioned above to be recognized as truths by human beings and to be regonized as being fundamentally different from pure information processing algorithms, it already necessitates that there must be “aspects of the world that are not in themselves symbols”. Therefore I conclude that one of these aspects is objective meaning in conjunction with objective information, both being able to exist in the world because they inherently and immanently are already the signature of a certain goal that was “implemented” together with the existence of the world.

This view of mine is in constrast to the point of view where the universe is seen as a purely information processing entity, but when asked what's the information content it computes the answer is “nothing” (or likewise “everything”). Both answers contradict the objectivity assumption, the assumption of there being an external world that is consistent and independent of beliefs, and therefore these answers already contradict the standard model itself (means the pure information processing paradigm). Thus, that paradigm in my opinion is not consistent with our notion of truth, and therefore not consistent with a consistent logics.

Lorraine Ford

Dear CornflowerCicada,

thank you for your decisive answer, I am now able to much better see what you see and I agree.

P.S. I already rated your essay after I first commented on your page – in case that the issue of ratings in this contest should be important to you.

Best wishes
AquamarineTapir

Stefan Weckbach

I think this comment of mine, made on the essay page of CornflowerCicada, should also appear here.

Stefan Weckbach Dear CornflowerCicada,

I want to thank you so much for our exchange of thoughts. I just read your essay again and I highly recommend it for everybody to read and contemplate it. This is good and solid work you have done and worth much more attention than it has received so far in my opinion.

Best wishes
AquamarineTapir

Jenny Wagner

Dear Beige Bandicoot,

thanks so much for the nice picture of the aquamarine tapir (me! :-), I will take that picture for my colour-animal-account (yours looks quite nice, too!)!.

One of the reasons for why many scientists (in my opinion) have abandoned the idea / the hypothesis for a Creator God is that the physical world seems to be so different from any conceivable God-like realm. The physical seems to rule with an iron fist, and therefore, many people infer, there is no place even for the idea of a Creator.

An example: I think it had been the Scholastiks that developed the seemingly contradiction between an omnipotent God and physical reality. They asked whether or not God is able to fabricate a stone that is that heavy that God himself is not able to lift that stone.

At first glance it seems convincing that this is a real contradiction, not only a logical one, but also somewhat a physical one, since it suggests that God is bound to his physical creation. Surely, God, in my opinion is not omnipotent, since he / she surely cannot annihilate himself (I simply assume this without further proof).

So let's also assume that God isn't able to fabricate a stone that is too heavy for him to lift. From this follows that God is “merely” able to fabricate stones that he himself is able to lift.

The first sentence above is about an impossibility. The second sentence above is about a possibility.

Let's now imagine the possibility for God fabricating a stone that has infinitely many atoms, each of them infinitely heavy. One could even imagine a stone that is made out of a non-denumerable infinity of atoms whereby each of the atoms is infinitely heavy – as long as God is able to lift that stone. And voila – what had been a severe contradiction in the minds of the Scholastiks is now possible: God can make any conceivable stone, as long as he can lift it.

This example shows me how nonsensical it is trying to pull down the idea of a Creator to the layer of human physical understandings.

I like to tell you another line of reasoning that may be equally nonsensical than the first one. Imagine that you have a list of all the things that are physically impossible. Let's say this list is long, but not infinitely long, it is finitely long.

Now you are able to decide what things are possible in principle and what things are not. You simply had to look up the list and see whether or not the thing that you examine is listed as impossible. If it is not listed as impossible – well, then it is at least possible. So far, so good.

But now remember that there is a difference between a possible thing and a necessary thing. Necessary things must happen necessarily. Possible things are possible to happen, but mustn't happen. But now we have a problem: if certain possible things NEVER happen, they are in a certain sense IMPOSSIBLE, aren't they? Therefore, they had to be on the list of all impossible things!

It seems that with this result we have deduced that possible and necessary things are one and the same – if something is “possible”, in reality it must be necessary to happen! This then would strengthen (prove?) the worldview of Many Worlds.

But can this be? Can a simple thought experiment with a simple finitely long list somewhat prove the Many Worlds interpretation of QM be correct? That would mean that logics somewhat could dictate how fundamental physics should behave!

I think there are at least two errors in the above line of reasoning. Firstly we have no such list. Secondly logics tells me – on the basis of the two given examples – that what is possible to exist, what is impossible to exist and what is ultimately necessary to exist are things that are at least beyond human reasoning. I would go a step further and say that all three modalities may not be ultimately fixed, so there is plenty of “wiggle room”. For this to be true and at the same time not be drifting into paraconsistent logics, in my opinion it needs a Creator whose abilities are beyond human understanding of causality and human logical systems. That is what I refer to when I say that logics is able to “transcend” itself: one needs a reference point where it is able to transcend into.

You are right, the ontological question is at the heart of how to interpret QM. The latest effort to circumvent non-locality that I have read about is by Tim Palmer and Sabine Hossenfelder. They suggest that the state space of all quantum mechanically possible experiments is such that not only the probabilities come out according to the Born rule, but also such that certain states that are implicit in all the Bell inequalities aren't existent in that huge state space.

What the authors in my opinion have done is nothing other than to define a list of allowed states for the purpose of explaining violations of Bell-like inequalities without having to introduce space-time like nonlocalities. Although I cannot exclude the existence of such a state-space, I like the approach for two reasons: firstly it demonstrates how thin the line between possible and impossible is – judged by human beings. Secondly it is obvious (at least to me) that this approach (called “supermeasure”) is entirely motivated by the intention to avoid non-locality in physics.

Similar hypothesis' have been facilitated with infinities involved by taking the mathematical fact of self-referencing formulas as physical facts, saying that the bottom layer of reality is infinitely fractal in nature. I whole heartedly would say that George Ellis is right what he says about infinities in nature.

I also agree that unity is indeed a holy grail, I think it is directly experienced by human beings via their 5 senses that seem to be very well “integrated” into consciousness such that we experience the world around us as a unity. I therefore think that consciousness and its unity is a separate level of reality, at least when the brain works how it should (see brain-split patients etc. where that does not quite work out). For me, it is no wonder why physicists strive for unity, since I think that is what is the case anyways. Monotheistic religions have figured this out and Christianity (and the bible) is built on the assumption that nature (creation) is not equal with God. Abraham, before he went to the promised land, worshiped a moon goddess, thus worshiped nature, the creation instead of the Creator.

The problem with the hypothesis of a Creator is not that this hypothesis is stupid right from the start, but that it has the “baggage” of tension between what individuals dreams for their own lifes and what God gave as commandments for each individual – to enhance the whole, not only the individual. Surely, there are other problems like the quest of evil in the world etc. But from a logical point of view I would say that nothing can speak against such a Creator, since we not even know on a logical basis what things are fundamentally impossible to exist, what things are fundamentally possible to exist and what things are fundamentally necessary to exist. About the latter I would say that for reaching at all a grip on what is fundamental in reality, human logics demands that itself is a clever invention of something that is necessarily more intelligent than human beings.

I know, many people will disagree with that. But on what basis should the human brain be ever able to discover something like a “theory of everything”, other than on the basis of wishful thinking, means the wish that the universe should be such that it is totally congruent to human logics and human mathematics? And if true, wouldn't that be the most anthropocentric idea in the whole history of mankind – the fundamental layer of reality is such that it perfectly fits the intellectual capacities of a randomly evolved “ape” that at some point in time “realized” that he is neither at the center of the universe, nor at the center of the solar system nor at any center at all. Nonetheless scientists strongly believe that this “ape” should at least be at the center of intelligence in the universe such that it is able to “find out” that its intellectual capacities are perferctly congruent with fundamental reality... Well, these lines of thoughts are not convincing to me, since they obviously are born out of wishful thinking that an impersonal, solely material and rigogorously deterministic physical reality should deliver to us what we so whole-heartedly wish for.

It may well be that we really cannot unite QM with GR. Not because reality is not a unity, but because the big picture isn't solely made up only from physical things. It may well be that physical reality is not there for the purpose that humans understand how “it works”, but for an entirely different purpose. To cut a long story short, many scientists in my opinion seem to think that reality is there for the purpose of entirely understanding it by humans. I see that as an equally anthropocentric idea as may be considered the idea of a Creator, so in this respect both ideas are at par.

Best wishes
Aquamarine Tapir

Dear Beige Bandicoot,

in my previous post, I left out certain aspects of what you wrote. I like to add my thoughts on these aspects here.

Concerning consciousness, in my opinion there is this huge gap between death physical material that in parts can be measured and conscious Qualia. Measured always means a quantitative evaluation on a certain scale. It is all about the question “how much X is involved?”.

Qualia on the other hand expresses qualities. If you would get blind tomorrow, a huge part of these qualities would vanish: you can't anymore navigate easily in the world, things will get much more stressful. We know from blind people that they not even “see” a black screen, they seem to see “nothing”. Nonetheless, in comparison to a dead stone, the latter not even “sees nothing” or can describe what it is to be blind.

So even the total lack of vision, the latter being something that could theoretically be measured for example by inventing a quantitative scale for the impression of the colour purple, is a qualitative aspect of consciousness. It cannot be desribed other by some insufficient human words or some quantitative scale. But nowhere within that scale and its measurement algorithm we ever will find what it is like to see the colour purple, the quality of the experience – or in other words, experience itself. The world of mathematics has only “experience” insofar as it is projected by human beings into that mathematics. I think many mathematicians confuse this aspect: you can only talk about qualia-like “qualities” in mathematics because there is the experience of what it is like to do mathematics and this is solely due to the existence of Qualia.

I conclude from this that approximating scientifically what Qualia is “made of” will run into the same conundrum, the experience of what it is like to have certain qualia must implicitely be put into the ontology of the theory that aims to explain it in the first place and we end up with a kind of tautology, packaged into what we then later call a “theory of Qualia”. That such a theory must be very strange in order to grasp what Qualia is “made of” then could be demonstrated if one explains that theory to the totally blind person.

Of course, the blind person will not see colours during us explaining colours to that person. What that person presumably will “experience” (thus, hear) is a lot of quantitative desriptions about the human brain, thus explanations for why that person is not able to see colours. Since that person was formerly able to see colours (if not blind from birth), there has to be a change in the person's brain. But even figuring out that cange, in my opinion, is not at all sufficient to capture what it is like to have visual qualia – or what it is like to NOT have visual qualia. It once more will only be about the correlates of consciousness in the human brain (what in itself is a worthwile project to undertake).

“... any further proof or counterexample on an empirical basis also requires that we have assumed a certain ontology and relation to the (epistemical) model to be tested.”

Yes, that is true and that's a huge problem, since one can always invent further “explanations” to even counteract any counterexamples. The question then becomes how independent these explanations are from beliefs. In the case of the “supermeasure” hypothesis to explain away non-locality, I would say that this hypothesis is obviously motivated by the wish to make QM locally-realistic. That is not bad in itself, but is at odds with statistical independence and attributes to human-made quantum experiments a special status, or formulated alternatively it attributes to all quantum measurements in nature the feature that the results should be exclusively due to locally-realistic interactions. In my opinion, the latter, although it at first sight seems to be reasonable to assume that ontology, nonetheless is motivated solely by human wishes, not by evidence. So it is a matter of taste whether or not one believes in a state-space that is of the kind the “supermeasure” hypothesis proposes it. And “taste” is clearly totally dependent on the existence of human beings and their preferences! Moreover, how could we ever explain that something like “taste” exists in the universe, be it on the basis of fundamental non-locality or on the basis of a locally-realistic picture of the world? Once more, here the cat bites into its own tail and the problem of Qualia again shines through. Once more, it seems to be a matter of taste to see the factual existence of Qualia as a “problem” or to see it as a “solution” (in the sense that it points to something generically meaningful in the universe).

Yes, you are right, these “musings” are nothing else than questioning once again an assumed ontology (the one that says that there cannot be any final, teological reasons for the existence of the universe and all the rest) and trying to replace it by another one. Asking for a deeper reason for the existence of “taste”, “preferences”, “beliefs” and assumptions in a world that is assumed to be almost fundamentally made out of merely dead stuff is at the one hand a heresy – but on the other hand that is what science is doing all the time (asking questions). So I think there is something wrong with attributing to the existence of dead stuff the sticker “existence without further reason”. That, self-evidently, is once more “just” another ontological assumption, but in my opinion one that is in congruence with the existence of “taste”, “preferences”, “beliefs” and “final reasons” (the latter meant in the sense of Aristotle's fourth cause).

In my opinion one cannot argue away the existence of these qualia-like things. “Final reasons” are already implicit in every attempt to find a “theory of everything”. These final reasons will not be implicit in the theory itself, but these final reasons are surely already implicit within the scientists' agenda (belief) to at all search for such a theory, since it is his wish to finally find all the reasons that could act as final evidence for a universe that has no such final reasons to exist! Moreover, it is believed that this universe should be such that it allows human beings to find that final evidence!

For me, that kind of agenda is somewhat a contradiction in terms, showing that we are far away from any evidence to finally explaining how and why the world is what it is. We not even can map the landscape of all impossible, all possible and all necessary things, and in my opinion for good reasons, since these three modalities may not be that interdependent on each other as we may think they are: from an assumed bird's eye view they even may be logically independent from each other in the sense that God has the freedom of not having fixed many of them eternally.

Well, that's it for now, again a really long comment.

Best wishes and looking forward to your comments on what I also already wrote in the course of this contest. Hope that it could make some sense to you and the reader in general.

Aquamarine Tapir